Blindsight
by shortstuff410
Summary: Post Promised Day battle, a blind Mustang reflects on the history of the tattoo that changed his life and his relationship with the woman who was forced to bear its secrets. {FMA: Brotherhood, one shot}


_Canon with 2009 anime and manga. Takes place after the Promised Day, but before Mustang learns that he can get his eyesight back. Spoilers galore. All characters belong to Arakawa. Beta done by WargishBoromirFan. Reviews appreciated._

**Blindsight**

It was some ungodly hour at night, and Roy Mustang couldn't sleep. Two full days had passed since the Promised Day, but the Colonel couldn't decide if it felt like two minutes or two years. Ever since his eyesight had been stolen from him, he felt like he couldn't get out of his head. It was almost as if there was a physical door behind his eyes, blocking out foresight and blocking in all the guilt and childish optimism that drove his ambitions.

Mustang took a deep breath and let it out in an extended sigh as his eyes slid closed. When he left them open, his mind searched desperately for anything visual to grab onto, throwing his phantom doors into stark relief. He had always heard that losing a sense brought a heightened ability to the other four, but when his eyes were open, he was so distracted by trying to see that he felt like nothing but darkness could reach him.

Now that he had allowed his eyelids to fall, he could hear and feel again.

Her slow regular breaths brought him more comfort than any consoling colleagues' words or doctors' reassurances ever could.

After their first night in the hospital, his lieutenant had demanded that she be moved into his room, and he couldn't have been more grateful. As he listened to Hawkeye sleep, Mustang tried to pull up a memory of her face, but all he found was the color and the warmth of her blood as it stained his arms. What a horrible last thing to see. He squeezed his eyes shut to try to banish the image. He would rather not see her at all than see her like that.

As he let his head fall back against the pillow, Mustang thought about how their lives had tangled together. He took it as a fundamental truth of the universe that he was in love with his lieutenant, and that she loved him in return. He wasn't sure when he came to this conclusion, but he had been sure of it for some time. There hadn't been an epiphany, no clash at the release of suppressed romantic tension, it just was. There was never any jealousy over the men and women that they each dated, because it was just so unshakably true that their emotions were already spoken for.

Of course neither of them had ever acted upon those emotions; she was too noble, and he was too proud. What they had was easy. Comfortable. And excruciatingly painful. Neither of them would risk the functionality of their partnership by bringing up a topic that needed no words or actions.

Mustang understood all this, but as he heard Hawkeye roll over in her sleep and let out a nearly inaudible sigh, he felt like banging his head against a wall. He should have been able to push past all that, pride and etiquette be damned. Now he would never see her in his arms. He would never get the chance to watching her eyes as he pressed a kiss to her lips. Stupid. That's what he was. Stupid and arrogant.

A memory flickered in the bottom of his mind like the snapping of a pilot light, forcing him to revise that statement. He had held her, just once.

* * *

It had been shortly after her father's funeral. As they stood in front of the gravestone, Mustang had blurted out his wish to change Amestris for the better in a desperate attempt to crack the heavy silence that blooms only in graveyards. He never would have expected that she would respond by offering up her father's secrets.

After accepting, he followed her back to her home. The house was warped under the heavy burden of disrepair and illness. He remembered following Hawkeye hesitantly to her room, unsure of how to handle their grief. He'd been trying so hard to come up with something to say to her that he didn't notice as she began to unbutton her shirt.

Mustang recalled with a smirk how his eyes had widened in disbelief as the cloth slid down her shoulders. He'd been almost certain that seeing his teacher's daughter topless was not on any of his possible agendas.

When he saw the top of the tattoo that sprawled across her back, the shock of understanding had flooded him with both relief and horror. How could the man have done this to his only child? The process must have been excruciating, and she would never be free of the painful memory etched into her skin.

The unveiling of this secret had destroyed any thoughts Mustang had of trying to find words sufficient to soften her sorrow, so he stood silently a few feet away, drinking in the knowledge that she had risked so much of herself to give him.

They stood that way for what must have been hours as he labored to comprehend every last detail of the gift he was being given. As Mustang reached the point where his understanding was complete enough to do the masterpiece justice, he had reached out reflexively to touch a line of text below Hawkeye's left shoulder-blade, causing her to jump under his fingers.

Realizing what he had done, Mustang snatched his hand away and began to make a flustered apology. As he backpedaled away from the action, she began to turn around. Mustang reminisced on how the look in her eyes had snatched all words away from him. His lip twitched into a small, private smile as he remembered thinking, _how have I never seen this girl before?_

That was too cliché, even for him.

Mustang clearly recalled how completely her gaze had captured him. He had unconsciously reached out his hand a second time to place his fingers at the corner of Hawkeye's jaw just below her ear. He could still bring to mind the way her skin pulled across the strong muscle and bone. He had been so enthralled with this single piece of her that he barely noticed as she took two deft steps towards him and pressed her lips to his.

He let his eyes close as she clung to him that day, but now, sitting in this hospital with her just a few feet away, Mustang desperately wished that he had kept his eyes open. He thought of how her hands had moved hesitantly to the base of his neck, asking permission to deepen the kiss as he ran his hands lightly down her ribs. His thumbs brushed against the sides of her still bare breasts before coming to rest on her hips.

She was unexpectedly strong. Up to that point, Mustang had always thought of her as meek and fragile, but his hands told him a different story. As Hawkeye leaned into him, he considered how different she was from her father.

Master Hawkeye's face had intruded into the moment and brought to light the realities of the situation. Riza had just buried the father with whom she had a strained relationship at best and an abusive one at worst. The pain she had to be feeling must have been immense, and he could not take advantage of that.

Mustang broke the contact of their lips and pushed away from her body, forcing space between them. He couldn't help but let his hands linger a few seconds at her waist and his eyes at the shine on her lips where their tongues had met.

There had been no embarrassment or confusion on Hawkeye's face, just acceptance and resignation at his decision. She'd remained silent. Mustang repeated that she could always find him at the military before turning and walking out of the house, closing the door soundly behind him.

Mustang still liked to tell himself that he had walked away calm and collected, but he knew that he had fled. He had been embarrassed at his actions and frustrated with his lack of control. He'd honestly expected to never see her again.

* * *

Mustang turned his face towards the open window in his hospital room, feeling a gentle breeze whisper through his eyelashes. _God, we were young,_ he thought as he drew in a deep lungful of night air.

He imagined he could see the stars and the lights in the buildings and streets of Central through his closed eyelids. He stretched his mind across the city, over to the command center and all the way to the military academy.

It was easy to make the argument that everything had started there. That was where the first bricks composing the path he was following had been laid. That was where he was sculpted into a dog of the military. If only he had known what that meant back then.

* * *

Two years after the Flame Alchemist's death, Mustang heard that Hawkeye had joined the academy. He had forced himself into inaction. _If she wants to see me, she will find me,_ he'd rationalized over and over.

On some level, he probably felt guilty for playing a role in her joining up and becoming a soldier, because he'd still thought of her as weak and vulnerable. How foolish he had been.

Hughes had laughed at him the one time he voiced his anxiety over Hawkeye. At the time, Mustang assumed that Hughes was simply making fun of smooth talking Roy Mustang for having girl problems, but in retrospect it was more likely that he was laughing at the absurdity of the notion that Hawkeye needed Roy Mustang to look after her. Hughes had always been much more observant than Mustang, which is probably why he ended up in Investigations.

When Mustang heard about how quickly Hawkeye was making a name for herself as one of the best marksmen of their time, a bit of the guilt he fostered had turned to pride. It was misplaced pride, but it still made him feel a bit better.

She didn't need him.

When the military shipped Mustang off to Ishval, he'd felt confident that Hawkeye would be fine until he returned. He never would have guessed that they would send such a fresh recruit into that war. Maybe if he had known that she was there, her hawk's eyes watching over him, he wouldn't have become such a monster. Maybe he would have found a way to use his flame alchemy to _save_ lives rather than destroy them.

Mustang pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. This line of thought was pointless and self-indulgent. He knew better than anyone that what was done was done.

The day Hawkeye approached him on the battlefield, he had barely recognized her. The quiet reservation and careful hesitancy he associated with her had been stripped away.

He remembered thinking that this war had ruined her. If it was capable of giving Riza Hawkeye the eyes of a killer, what chance did the rest of them have? Thinking back, Mustang realized that he had been wrong. 'Killer's eyes" was not quite right. They were disillusioned, certainly. Distant and maybe a little broken, but they had neither the coldness of a killer nor the heat of a murderer. What he couldn't see back then was the quiet determination in those eyes, resolute and steadfast.

It was after the war had ended when he found her burying an Ishvalan child that he first glimpsed the nature of her strength.

Her voice wavered as she recounted the nightmares and guilt this war had carved into her. Her quietly burning anger at the way he had used her father's research. The tattoo bore down on her back with the weight of every life that flame alchemy had taken.

When she asked him to erase the record of her father's sins with the very secrets she wished to bury, it was oddly fitting. Horrifying, but fitting. Mustang had known that he could not deny her this. It was her right to ask it of him and his duty to comply, no matter how much it had pained him to think of causing her more agony.

That night, they walked into the desert to find a quiet place to destroy the record of flame alchemy.

They stood several feet apart, just as they had years before when she had given him this most terrible of gifts. She didn't make a sound as her skin bubbled and charred. It blackened and cracked in the harrowing fashion unique to living flesh. Mustang hated that the smell of burning human had become familiar to him.

Despite the frissons of pain that he knew must have been racking her body, she'd remained standing. It was only when she turned to fix her gaze on him that he noticed the trickle of blood running down her chin. She had bitten through her own tongue.

After a few moments, she swallowed hard, and thanked him. It was then that her strength truly hit him. The fact that she could thank him for such a horrible act continued to baffle him to this day.

After they had returned to camp and he helped treat her wounds as best he could, the guilt crashed over him. When they parted ways, Mustang had been sure that this time, _this time_ he really would never see her again. He'd been sure that she would leave the military and walk away from him forever. How could she possibly forgive him for all the terrible things he had done?

Looking back at what they had become, Mustang realized that one of the reasons they worked so well together was that Hawkeye never did forgive him. To do so would undermine the suffering they had caused. Instead she offered to shoulder the burden with him.

A few months later when she approached him in his office and told him that she would "follow him into hell" if he asked her, the depth of her strength had nearly swallowed him whole.

That was the image he wanted to keep of her, the first time he really saw her.

* * *

Mustang balled his fists in the rough hospital sheets. He was still amazed at Hawkeye's ability to take all that suffering and temper it into a force for change. It was this ability that let Mustang trust Hawkeye with the responsibility of deciding between saving his life and taking it.

He considered the relationship they'd built on this trust.

They functioned in perfect harmony, two faces of the same coin, even if it rarely looked like that from the outside. When she was yelling at him for slacking on his paperwork to when he teased her about her love life, when she lectured him on his overprotective nature and thinly veiled sexism to when he ran her ragged babysitting the rest of the troops, and even when they flirted shamelessly as a cover for their investigation into the fifth laboratory, there was always an underpinning of understanding. Mustang knew that he relied heavily on the resilience that was integral to Hawkeye's character.

When dealing with the aftershocks of Hughes' murder, it was her strength that had kept him standing. The day of the funeral, Mustang had asked his lieutenant if she would continue to follow him despite the clear dangers that lay ahead. He already knew the answer she would give, but he needed to hear her say it anyway. He needed confirmation of her consistency. He needed to believe that nothing could crack her fortitude.

It was probably this irrational belief that made his rage nigh incorrigible when he found her at Lust's feet, ready to give up on life at the prospect of his death. It was crippling to think of an evil great enough to cause that strength to waver, and nothing could have stopped him from erasing that atrocity from existence at any cost, up to and including his sanity. Only Hawkeye was able to pull him back from the edge of that unrelenting fury.

Once Mustang had regained his composure, he was able to internalize the fact that her strength was at least partly dependent on his.

It wasn't until his Lieutenant was assigned to Führer Bradley that he realized how deep their codependence went. She truly was his queen. If he was honest with himself, he knew that Hawkeye was his queen even outside of the chess metaphor.

He had thought that this realization had given him enough perspective to push forward and do what needed to be done. It was almost laughable to think about that now; perspective was the last thing he needed where his lieutenant was concerned. In hindsight, it wasn't until the culmination of this whole homunculus debacle that Mustang finally understood where he stood in relation to Hawkeye.

Everything came to a head when they encountered Envy in the bowels of the city, when Mustang fell into the same madness that had nearly taken him during his battle with Lust.

Hawkeye's willingness to point a gun at his head was more poignant than a wedding ring. Mustang's anger had rushed out of him, wiping away the false strength he drew from vengeance. The shock of its loss prevented him from responding to her coded declaration until her very life hung in the balance. Mustang answered her when he refused to perform human transmutation to save his lieutenant's life. It was one thing to be willing to die for someone, but to watch them do the same for you required a devotion many times deeper. To think that the gold toothed doctor had called him cold... it was utterly ridiculous. There would never be a more eloquent way for him to express how profoundly he cared.

Some part of him grasped that the emotions they had silently validated that night should have been enough for him, but when Mustang remembered that her blood would be the last thing he ever saw... it ate at his soul like acid.

* * *

Mustang sighed heavily without thinking of the sleeping form only feet away. He had ended up back at the very image he had been trying to escape. His breath hitched audibly in frustration and pain.

"Colonel?" came the obviously awake voice from across the room.

Nervous that his voice would betray his thoughts, he remained silent and swallowed hard.

"You all right, sir?" she prompted after a few seconds of silence.

"Fine, lieutenant," he answered. "Just thinking about how we should start the rebuild of Ishval."

The pregnant pause let him know that she knew he was lying. Of course she did. He should have known better than to try to sneak something past her by now.

"So was I, sir," she said finally. Mustang could feel the meaning behind the words. They were both quiet for several long moments until the heavy silence started to make him itch.

"Don't be so quiet, Hawkeye," he said eventually. "I need...I need to know you're still there." He winced at how needy he sounded.

"Sorry, sir."

The sheets rustled as she slid out from under the covers and placed her bare feet on the floor. Mustang made out the sound of a chair being lifted, a short pause and the scrape of it being replaced, as Hawkeye obviously thought better of it. He listened intently as her footsteps closed the space between them, and his eyebrows lifted in disbelief as the mattress dipped. The warmth of her hip brushed against his side as she sat on the edge of the bed. He would never have expected her to be so bold, so disregarding of military hierarchy.

A moment later, he felt a feather-light touch at the inside of his wrist before she laced her fingers with his bandaged hand. There was a twinge of pain from his unhealed wound, but he didn't even flinch.

"Is this better, sir?" she asked, and Mustang could hear the teasing smile on her lips.

"Lieutenant..." he said, caught between warning and beseeching.

When she didn't move, Mustang lifted his other hand with slow, deliberate confidence up to the line of her jaw. He didn't know how, but he knew exactly where she was. His fingers alit at the same spot he had touched on the day of her father's funeral. The significance was not lost on him.

After momentarily reacquainting himself with her skin, he allowed his fingers to skim down her neck and over the bandages that covered her slashed throat before coming to rest at the hollow of her collar-bone.

"Goddammit, Hawkeye," he said, "I will never be able to atone for this." He sighed and moved to take his hand away. Before his fingers could break contact, however, his lieutenant pressed her hand over his.

"Don't you dare go blaming yourself for this," she growled.

"But..."

"No. It's condescending and trivializes my role in all of this. Stop feeling sorry for yourself." There was a finality in her voice that made him pause. "Now, please shut up Colonel, because I am about to kiss you. Sir." She punctuated the statement with a formality that just dared him to protest, leaving no room for hesitation or surprise.

Mustang didn't get any time to reorient himself before he felt his lieutenant's breath on his cheeks followed an instant later by the insistent weight of her lips against his. There was a confidence in her movements that captivated him. When he felt her tongue flick across his lower lip, he became powerless against her, and all remaining protests vanished.

Mustang pushed himself up into a more upright position to increase the contact, desperate to memorize the feel of her. As she slid her hands over his shoulders he instinctively reached out to wrap his hands around her hips. The feeling of the calloused pads of his fingers catching on the softness of her skin raised a line of goosebumps under his hand wherever he touched. He slowly slipped his hand under the hem of her shirt and onto the warm expanse of her back.

Mustang's hand had just begun to slide up her spine when he felt the texture of her skin change. He flinched as he encountered the scar, and his whole body froze. Her disfigurement was the physical manifestation of everything he had done wrong in his life, and the weight of his sins slammed into him like a freight train. Before he could pull away however, Hawkeye reached around and snatched his wrist with her sniper's reflexes, pressing his palm back onto her skin.

"No."

She had pulled away from his mouth just enough to allow her to speak, while remaining close enough that her voice buzzed on his lips.

"This is a gift you gave me," she continued, her voice heavy with seduction and authority, "not a curse. As such, you will treat it with as much respect and care as I do."

Confident that he would stay put, Hawkeye released her hold on his wrist. In one fluid movement, she braced her hand at the base of Mustang's neck and swung her leg over his hip to kneel with one leg on either side of his body.

Mustang couldn't help himself. He smirked.

"I had always guessed you were a woman who liked to be on top."

"Colonel, you have no idea." He shivered at the heat in her words, his guilt forgotten. "And while I am flattered that you have taken the time to think of me in such terms, I would like to remind you that we are in a hospital where patients are trying to sleep. So would you kindly shut. Up. Sir."

As she covered his mouth with hers, he found himself wondering why he ever thought he needed eyes to see her.

Ze End.

* * *

**Note: The title comes from a psychological condition where a person with severe damage to the visual cortex of the brain, who is completely blind, can still tell if a car is coming or even catch a ball. They will have no idea how they did it, and have no conscious sense of "seeing" what they reacted too. This is awesome for two reasons: the brain is amazingly flexible and adaptable, and it suggests that it is quite likely that there is a lot of sensory input all people are receiving and acting upon without them ever knowing about it. Google for more info.**

**Also, if people like this, I might write a follow up for when he gets his sight back once I get some feedback.**

**P.S. You can't escape the potato.**


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